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Overview

The New York Times bestseller, now in paperback, a “furiously compelling” (New York Times) and richly compassionate novel about marriage, ambition, and reclaiming of love—by novelist and cofounder of the online fiction magazine Narrative.

Set in San Francisco, Three Stages of Amazement takes readers on a spellbinding journey across a landscape of national unease, when the fragility of one marriage reflects the tenuous state of the American Dream. Lena Rusch and her husband, Charlie Pepper, still believe they can have it all—sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But when life delivers surprises and tests, they must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation. Told with eloquence and compassion, Three Stages of Amazement is a true thriller of the heart—about confronting adversity, gaining wisdom and finding great love.

Product Details

About the Author

Carol Edgarian is the author of the bestselling novel Rise the Euphrates and co-editor of The Writer's Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame. She is also the co-founder, editor, and publisher of Narrative, an online literary magazine she runs with her husband, Tom Jenks. They live in San Francisco with their three daughters.

Read an Excerpt

One

The modern marriage has two states, plateau and precipice, and in the winter of our recent crisis—with markets plummeting and even rich folks crying poor; with the dark reign of one tinsel president finally ending, and the promised hope of a new man about to start; yes, with hope rising like a cockamamie kite and fear more common than love—Charlie Pepper forgot his wife.

He didn’t mean to. That much Lena knew. She paused at the kitchen sink on New Year’s Eve morning, the last day of the lousiest year of their lives, and considered what she needed and what she knew. The crab needed to come out of the fridge. What about butter? She’d forgotten candles. She needed another bag of ice. It had been a year since they’d even thought about hosting a dinner. Since then the world fell down one black hole and she and Charlie fell down another; as yet no one had come back. But Obama was taking over in twenty days and Lena had hope. She also had a sick baby and no lettuce. And if years ago Lena and Charlie promised that their hearts would always be in sync, well, it was a fool’s promise, wasn’t it? For now their hearts were a cacophony of chuffing and banging, with Charlie’s motor driving like a great battleship and hers a bubbling alchemist’s pot. Then there were the children’s hearts: Theo’s drum sounded like quick boots pounding up the stairs, while Willa’s was more skittish, the flap-flap of gossamer wings. And there was a third heart so silent it took away sound.

“Usted está mutada en el burro, tiene que seguir,” Glo called, on her way out the door after tending Willa half the night so Lena could sleep. “You’re on the burro, you might as well go.”

In quick-fire Spanish, Lena answered, hoisting the baby onto her shoulder. “The burro is strong. Now why can’t he have an extra pair of hands?”

Glo chuckled, her girlish, brown fingers covering her mouth. Seven years ago, Glo crossed the border at night led by a coyote, leaving her two kids and her mother behind in Guatemala. Every Sunday Glo called home, and sometimes her youngest, Rosella, refused to speak to her. Yet here she was talking of Lena’s burros. It was life, this crazy life, and if you didn’t laugh it broke you. It broke you anyway, but it was better if you laughed.

All day Lena made lists and as she carried Willa up the stairs she started a new one. Butter, candles, ice. If, while working feverishly, Charlie forgot her and the kids, it was never for long. He forgot them repeatedly, at moments, across days, in time. Lena, five years younger but dog-aged in matters of love, likewise misplaced Charlie, with all the worry and push she had to nudge up the road. I ought to write it down: butter, candles, ice, she thought, when Willa started coughing again. Lena ran. Charlie was forty-seven, she was forty-two. They had five years between them and eight years of marriage to their backs and to say they were committed was to say they were in deep.

Yet they missed each other.

And Lena wanted—oh, she wanted—to be touched inside her bones. But Charlie was elsewhere—it might be Uganda, or Boston, or an hour south at the office, or asleep in the bed beside her. Dear Charlie, grinding his jaw.

“Theo,” Lena called, grabbing the newspaper as she pushed down the hall on her heels. “I’ll have the door closed. Come find me, honey. Don’t shout.”

She kicked the bathroom door shut and flipped on the shower. As it roared to life, Lena whispered into Willa’s tiny ear, “That’s it, breathe.”

Willa, ten months old, weighed just eleven pounds. In her short life she had been to the hospital a dozen times. With pneumonia, seizures, surgeries, not to mention those four months at the start. The doctors talked gravely of cognitive delays, and worse. Cerebral palsy was a term sometimes used. Lena stopped her ears. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, it was that believing took her only so far. What Willa needed, Lena felt sure, was time. Lena’s job was to seize time.

As the steam built, Lena first stripped Willa to her diaper, then peeled off her own sweats down to her panties. Making a bed of towels on the tiled floor, she sat—for the first time all morning—with her knees bent, her back against the wall, showing the cabinets her real face, the face she let no one see. Lena Rusch was irreverent, good-looking, plucky. She had a fine if exhausted brain. This meant she couldn’t always recall the lists she made, or the ends and even the middles of her sentences, but she always started out with a bang. She was a romantic and, worse, an optimist. Fate had forced her to be practical and stolid, too. The two sides rubbed. She was crazy for her children, her friends, chocolate, and news of any kind. She might be crazy for Charlie, too, if she came across him in the daylight once in a while. In other words, Lena Rusch was extraordinarily ordinary: she worked and reared and hardly slept; she began each day prepared for a surprise.

Preemies did best skin to skin. Lena laid Willa’s bare chest like a cloth over her own, and making sure her baby was upright with the world, she gently drummed on the tiny back. Willa moaned, burrowing her face in the cave of Lena’s neck. “Sweetheart,” Lena murmured. “Come on, come on.”

“There you are!” Jesse cried, throwing open the door. They were sisters, and though Jesse was much, much younger, they entered rooms as their mother had taught them, like a storm. “I’ve been shouting a lung out downstairs. Theo finally—”

“Shut the door, you noodle! You’re letting out the steam!”

Jesse did as she was told. But between the blasting shower and the stifling heat, she wouldn’t stay long. “What? Is she sick again?” Jesse folded her arms. “Poor pup. Poor you.”

“Nah. We’re fine.”

Technically they were only half sisters. Jesse, sixteen years Lena’s junior, was the product of a love affair their mother had, one of many, after Lena’s father died. She was as long-limbed and blonde as Lena was curvy and dark. Their mother told everyone that Jesse was helping out with the children until she found a job, but Jesse was a child herself.

“So. What are you wearing tonight?” she asked.

Lena tipped her head against the wall and laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Oh, yes.” Lena smiled wistfully. It wasn’t so long ago (in truth, it felt like a minute) that Lena was the one flying out the door to get wasted at high school parties while little Jesse flapped her hands from her bouncy seat. And while that was long ago, Jesse still manipulated like a child—openly, as if she were the only one playing for keeps. Sighing, Lena rubbed circles in Willa’s back. “I gave the black dress to Glo.”

“You what? You gave it to the nanny?”

“Not nanny. Glo.”

“Christ, Lean.”

Truthfully, Lena would have given Gloria Angelica Cardenas anything—anything—for Glo saved Lena’s sanity every single day. And besides, the rapture on Glo’s face when Lena handed her the box was worth a hundred, maybe a thousand, black dresses. Lena looked up at Jesse, trying to decide if she should take the trouble to explain. But Jesse was looking at herself in the mirror, continuing that frank, daily conversation women have with their faces. “Ugh. New Year’s Eve and no guy. I hate my life!”

“Fa.”

Jesse turned. “OK, Miss Veteran. When. When is he going to show up?”

Lena’s grinned slyly. “They always do.”

At last Willa coughed, good and wet. It was enough. Jesse escaped, slamming the door behind her, as Lena put Willa to her breast. They would be there another hour. With one arm hooked under the baby, Lena spread the newspaper across her knees, where the steamy ink would stain her black. She didn’t care. This was the moment she’d been waiting for—her reward being four full pages in the New York Times on Bernie Madoff and his colossal Ponzi scheme. Lena was in awe of Madoff, who, by promising steady returns of eighteen percent, had perpetrated the largest stock fraud in history. He’d swindled at every level, from the Wall Street fat cats, to relatives, to Palm Beach society, to grieving Jewish widows, to the mistress who claimed he had a small penis, to Mort Zuckerman, the media titan, to Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor, to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Yet in the photo on the front page Madoff showed no remorse. He walked the streets, a Jew with a George Washington haircut; he smiled like a shark for the paparazzi.

Her guests arrived all at once. They tossed their coats over the banister and pressed wine and chocolate into Lena’s hands. There was much hugging. Lena made a robust effort to herd them into the living room, but they ignored her, following her into the small kitchen, where they grouped like stupid, happy cows.

“Get the fuck out of here!” she cried, laughing helplessly, but they only smiled and kept on talking. These were the beloveds: Lee Swanson, showing off his new baby blue suede jacket, and Josh Klein, Charlie’s roommates from college, and Sandy, Josh’s wife. When Jesse appeared, having spent the afternoon talking on the phone, tweeting, Facebooking, and smoking a little grass, she made a beeline for Swanson, to tell him that his jacket was his best awful. Laughing, they all agreed.

Meanwhile Lena had four things she couldn’t remember and perhaps one of them was burning in the oven. She was about to check when Vi arrived. Violet Vesuvio, dear Vi, was Lena’s flag of joy, her best friend since they were sixteen, the year they each lost their virginity, one to a girl and one to a boy.

“Oh, god. The fucking traffic.” Vi gripped Lena’s shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes. “What. What is it?”

Lena wrinkled her nose. It had been a day.

“All right. We can fix this,” Vi said. “Start at the beginning. What have you been eating?”

Lena had a deep, womanly, shit-kicking laugh. “Oh, hi, Maude.” Turning, she greeted Vi’s new girlfriend, who appeared to be in costume, a men’s gray suit and fedora. “You look—”

“Rakish?” Maude tipped her head. Maude was a painter, a decent one; her oversize portraits sold best in Santa Fe and Miami. She was large-boned, mannish, with a small, pretty nose. Vi thought she was tremendous.

“Yes, rakish,” agreed Lena, and though undecided about Maude, she hugged her warmly. Everyone was here; they only lacked Charlie. For the next half hour, as she threw dinner together, Lena kept an anxious eye on the door. And when at last Charlie walked through it, she was so startled she nearly dropped a bowl. She plowed into him, backing them into the hall.

“Well, Doctor, I do like to see your face at the end of the year. Remind me, what’s your name?”

“Lena’s husband,” Charlie said, kissing her quickly. He’d been pushing toward this moment for more than two hours in traffic. But now that it was here, and Lena was beside him, Charlie couldn’t slow his molecules enough to enjoy her. Instead, he dropped the bags of butter, lettuce, and ice she’d asked for on the floor. “Hey. Can I talk to you a sec?”

“Sure.” Lena fiddled with his collar. She was pretending to ignore the gray hollows under his eyes and the smudge on his coat. What she wanted was a good kiss. A good kiss could restore them. Didn’t he know? A good kiss could sail them into the New Year just fine. But even as she longed for this, they headed in another direction—she watched with wonder, seeing them go—and instead of saying something romantic she asked, “Did you get the champagne?”

“Damn.”

“It’s OK. I screwed up on the groceries, but I remembered the booze!”

“Charged it?”

“Course.” She frowned. Now, why ask a thing like that? She shook her head and all but moaned. “Charlie, I want it to be … lovely. One night. Can it be lovely?”

“It is.”

She tried her best to smile. “All right. What do you want to tell me?”

For two hours fighting the traffic on 280, Charlie had practiced his lines. I got a call today, out of the blue. He had his speech ready and there would be no deep kisses until he got the words out. Until he came clean. But the way she was looking at him, with those yearning green eyes, well, you’d have to be heartless.

“You look great,” he said, and meant it. The truth was she looked wan and her hair seemed sort of wild. But even a wan, wild-haired Lena was sweet relief.

Lena patted her hair where Charlie’s gaze landed. Did she really look like hell? She wanted so much from the night. If only desire were enough to take them there. “OK,” she declared, brushing his lips with hers. “The bar first, then I need five chairs.”

Klein wiped his plate clean with a hunk of bread. “God, this is good. Lena, what’d you put in the crab?”

“Butter and butter. A touch of garlic.”

“No, something else.”

“Jalapeño. The thinnest of slivers.”

“Jalapeño! You are a witch, Lena-love. Pass that bowl.”

Lena, because she was nursing, had just the one glass, but it burned nicely in her cheeks and in the tops of her ears. She passed the crab to Klein on her right and the salad to Swanson on her left. Now where was Charlie? She looked down the long table, past the winking candles and rosy faces, to the opposite end. He wasn’t there. The thought of Charlie absent caught in Lena’s throat. And just like that she knew something had happened—something more.

She moved a candlestick aside, the panic rising—as if her heart had been zapped and the ceiling dropped lower. Where was he? From the far end of the table Sandy caught Lena’s eye. Sandy was a gynecologist, not a shrink, but since the twins’ birth she’d made it her business to keep tabs on Lena. Worse, Lena knew from Vi that Sandy believed that had she been the doc on call she could have prevented the twins’ early delivery. It was more than Lena could stand. The hubris. The exposed nerve. It wasn’t only her fatigue or pride that Lena didn’t want poked. It was a question of luck and unluck—and the tenderest, most unspeakable sorrow. It was, finally, a question of the heart. Lena’s heart was tired. And a tired heart is a susceptible one.

“Lena, help me here with Swanny,” called Sandy. “The eshag thinks he can cure a chronic sinus infection with amoxicillin!” Eshag was Sandy’s favorite word—Armenian for ass—but she applied it to all her favorites. “See that, Swanny—Lena agrees. Listen to me, esh: you have to go in there with napalm.”

Lena tried to stand but Josh Klein took her hand and pulled her into her seat. “Don’t even think about it,” he said kindly. In the wife department, Josh Klein considered Charlie one lucky dog. Then, too, with the market down fifty percent and no bottom in sight, Klein had been wondering all evening if this wasn’t the end of the world. He decided that was OK. It was OK if the world ended. He would chat with Lena, drink a little more and see if the forecast changed. Last year he’d brought Lena pots of caviar left over from the Goldman Sachs holiday party. This year couldn’t have been more different. A week before Christmas, he’d been forced to fire half of his department—guys and women he’d brought along. His dreams were haunted by their faces. And so Klein filled his and Lena’s glasses to the top. “Talk to me. Where were we?”

Lena smiled dimly.

“Come on, Helena. Pretend there’s no kids, no worries, sex forever. Money? Well, let’s leave money out of it.” Klein squeezed her hand. “What are you excited about? Is it Obama? Of course you love him. You and everyone are in love. The man is going to kill what’s left of the markets, but let’s not go there either. No, not Obama. Too shiny, too glorified. Let’s talk about a real skunk. Bernie—Bernie Madoff.”

Lena blushed. “Kleiny, are you obsessed with him, too?”

“No. I met him once and that cured me. A few years ago a friend of mine was thinking of investing with Bernie. When my pal asked to see a prospectus, Madoff’s people said, ‘Bernie doesn’t do that. It’s a trust thing.’ Please. You know, Lena, there’s a saying, If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”

In fact, Josh Klein had been thinking about Bernie Madoff almost as much as Lena had, but for different reasons. For Lena, Madoff’s business was beside the point; it was his motive, his character that intrigued her. For Klein it was just the opposite.

Meanwhile Lena was having what could only be called an inside-outside experience. She was talking with Klein and passing Vi the salt, while her heart searched the house for Charlie.

Lena looked deep into Klein’s soul. “What about Madoff’s sons?”

“Those two? No question. They did exactly what Daddy told them. Bernie wasn’t a guy who rewarded people for using their brains. Did you know that on the day he turned himself in one of the sons’ wives filed divorce papers?” It had been the talk on the street all week.

Klein refilled his glass. He’d drink until there was no more. And as he drank he was thinking, Boy oh boy, Charlie, get your ass back in here. She’s lonely, lonelier than she knows.

“Kleiny, please.” Lena gave his arm a push. “The wife knows—even if she doesn’t want to know.”

This much Charlie heard. He’d gone upstairs to check on the kids, and come down to get more wine from the garage. He’d been standing in the doorway, behind Lena, long enough to catch the gist. What he heard made him sick at heart. For something indeed had changed: that morning Charlie received a call from someone who could save his faltering company—this man happened to be the one person in the world Lena loathed. Charlie hoped he could explain it to her. But somehow she knew. My god, she knew.

Lena, unaware that Charlie was behind her, kept talking, and in that way dealt with her nerves. She was telling Klein about a woman who got arrested for shoplifting that morning at Whole Foods. “It was terrible. Theo heard the whole thing. The woman, she wasn’t young. Kleiny, here’s the strange part: she was wearing a sable coat.”

“Really? What’d she take?”

“It’s not what.”

“Oh no?”

“Yo, eshes!” Sandy called, rising from her chair. “Charlie, what are those two conspiring about now?”

“Thieves,” replied Klein. “We’re talking about thieves.”

A sable coat wasn’t something you’d expect to see, not even in January, and certainly not on a bright morning at the grocery store.

Motown blasted over the speakers; the aisles teemed with the holiday harried. Some economic downturn, thought Lena, hitching Willa higher in the sling so she was snug to her chest. Lena took Theo’s hand firmly and, hoping to keep him jolly, pretended they were doing a Viennese waltz as she led him into the crush. But as they took a shortcut down the shampoo aisle, the woman in the coat blocked their way.

“Mama,” Theo said, backing up.

“It’s all right, Theo.”

“Yes, little fellow, I won’t bite,” the woman said.

Something about her looked familiar. Lena guessed that her picture had been in the society pages. She had dyed yellow hair and white powdered skin and black kohl drawn under and above her pale eyes. She wore a large sapphire on her middle finger; her nails were frosted pink.

Unlucky, Lena decided, and she squeezed Theo’s hand to keep him from asking one of the questions she knew wanted to bust out of him. Theo wasn’t wrong to wonder. For despite all that glory, something about the woman signaled that she was past the good times. It wasn’t her saggy coat or shoes exactly, and it wasn’t the forced fact of wearing sable on a clear California morning; nor was it the bad dye job or the contrast she made to the young clerks stationed nearby—short, round girls with their nose piercings and tattoos. It was something else. On New Year’s Eve all she had in her basket was a box of pasta, a jar of marinara sauce and a screw-top bottle of red wine. She was studying a jar of cream, no bigger than a large thimble; she held it between her thumb and index finger.

“It’s called Pot O’ Gold, and they want ninety dollars for it,” she said, looking Lena square in the eye. “Can you imagine?”

Lena could. Even as she rolled her eyes, tsking, “It’s a crime, such a crime”—she could easily believe that a pot of nothing cost ninety dollars, and that this woman was going to steal that jar. There are all kinds of thieves in the world, and one sort always knows the other.

From inside the sling Willa coughed, barky as a seal.

“Oh, that bark!” the woman cried. “It’s a sound you never, ever forget. I remember with my middle boy.” Lena could see now that she was older, in her seventies at least. “Dear, have you dealt with croup before?”

“Ah, of course,” the woman said. “Scares the heck out of you, doesn’t it? With my boy, when it got really bad at night, we used to drive him around in the car with all the windows open. The wet air did the trick—calmed him down. Well, it’s always something. Me, I’ve just got to quit being stunned by these prices. And you—Good luck, dears. Happy New Year, all that lala.” The woman waved a jeweled hand as they pressed on.

It was a madhouse at the registers. The lines snaked into the produce aisles and doubled back. Lena and the kids took their place behind two Asian women, sisters no doubt, dressed in leggings and high boots and glossy ponytails that fell down their backs and swished their behinds. To kill time, they were perusing the magazine rack, snapping pages and commenting on the stars, as if they were their old friends. “Look, Madonna. Doesn’t she look better since she left Guy?”

“Hmm. She has excellent skin.”

“Botox up the yinny.”

“And how.”

Their chatter distracted Lena, and it wasn’t until Theo gave a sharp pull on her hand and cried out, “Mama!” that she turned to see the commotion in the Express line.

A security guard had stopped the woman in the fur as she was leaving the store. He demanded that she empty her pockets. Moving ever so slowly, she complied. From the depths of one pocket, she produced a wallet, a bunched silk scarf. Keys.

“Now the other one,” the guard said, opening his palm and wiggling his fingers.

Of course, by now everyone on line was watching—including Theo. Lena looked at her son. Theodore Pepper’s mud-brown eyes were already a bit wild with dark imaginings. Now this. We should all be embarrassed, Lena thought, dread weighting her heart.

It wasn’t the cream after all but a bottle of probiotics.

“Fifty-five bucks,” declared one of the Chinese girls.

“It’s a silly misunderstanding,” the woman explained, her voice unnaturally high. “I put the bottle in my pocket, you see, so it wouldn’t fall out of my basket. I had every intention of paying, of course.” She lifted her chin and sniffed. But despite that little bit of anarchy, the face couldn’t hold. It collapsed. With a world-weary sigh, she searched the crowd for help. “My husband. He needs them for his digestion. The doctor insists, and, well—”

She sighed—the husband, the doctor, all the trouble. “I don’t know what else to say. Honestly, I don’t. You are standing there looking very severe, my fellow. You have to know that I have been an excellent customer since you people first opened these doors.” She seemed to be operating under the assumption that for everyone’s sake this regrettable incident must be put behind them. She looked over her shoulder longingly, toward the parking lot.

The guard held out his palm and once again wiggled his fingers. The gesture was gross and she ignored it, her eyes fixed on the floor.

He dove that large hand into the silk-lined depths of her coat and took out a brick of Parmesan cheese. “Did you think this was gonna jump out of your basket, too?”

“Oh, god,” Lena said.

“Well, I couldn’t be more embarrassed, or feel more stupid,” the woman replied, her shoulders rounding. “No, it’s not possible. You have done your job, young man, no one can blame you for that. Oh, how stupid!”

But the guard didn’t think she was stupid, and he whispered as much in her ear. Her face broke with a fresh horror. “No!” she cried, sagging visibly, as he gripped her elbow, lifting it unnaturally high, and led her, unsteady in her skinny cocktail heels, toward the back of the store.

“Come on,” Lena said, feeling sick inside. She covered her mouth with her hand. Abandoning the cart, she marched them toward the door.

“But Mama—the groceries?”

“Leave them,” she choked. There was nothing certain in Lena’s life, not the bags of ice or the butter, not the credit card on which it would all be charged—not one thing certain, except the lump that was Willa, hung round her neck, and the hot, ardent squeeze of Theo’s paw.

Lena managed to steer them across the parking lot, even as her heart boomed and her legs felt spongy. “You don’t reduce people like that,” she said. “You just don’t.”

When they reached the car, she turned to Theo. He was awfully short and she had no choice but to bend down. This involved a fair act of balancing, what with Willa in the sling and Lena sort of swoony, and Theo himself only a few feet high. Squatting like a sumo wrestler, cursing under her breath, Lena tried to take the worry from her face. There would be no salad at dinner, and without butter the crab would be bone-dry. “Theo, honey. What is it?”

He narrowed his eyes. And weighing his words just like Charlie, his lips moving as he set his thoughts neatly and precisely in a row, he said, “That lady. Are they going to put her in the dungeon?”

“Don’t steal, Theo.” Lena tugged on the bunchy hem of Theo’s jacket.

“I won’t,” he said, pushing her shoulder lightly with his hand. There was something wiggly in Theo’s stomach and his mother was ignoring it. “That lady. Are they gonna … I mean do you think she’s bad? She’s bad, right?”

Squinting hard, Lena tried to think. From the beginning she understood that she didn’t own her children; at best, she hoped to be their worthy shepherd. Besides, Theo had come with his own urgency, an oddball directness, an urgency that had nothing to do with her. Here he was, eyeing her intently, proving that already he possessed all the faces he would ever use in this world—the lover, the worker, the goony bird and, my god, the judge.

“What do you think, Theo?”

“I think most grown-ups would say she’s bad, but you might not.”

Lena smiled. So true, so disarmingly true. She turned away to look across the parking lot. She would have to make it simple for him, to put his mind at ease. For one day soon Theo would know that his mother was also a thief.

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide forThree Stages of Amazement includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Carol Edgarian. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

INTRODUCTION

Seventeen years after the publication of her acclaimed debut novel, Rise the Euphrates, Carol Edgarian returns to fiction with the bracingly intelligent and compassionate Three Stages of Amazement. Set in San Francisco as the Great Recession descends upon the country, Edgarian’s novel is a thoughtful and riveting look at modern marriage, with an unforgettable cast of characters. She describes the promises we struggle to keep, the secrets that everyone knows and lives with, and the thousands of small compromises we make to remain a family.

TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Three Stages of Amazement is divided into the sections Silence, Disbelief, and Talk. Discuss what you think Edgarian means by these concepts. How do the characters deal with amazement (in all its forms) and how does that drive much of the plot of the book?

2. In an early scene between Charlie and Swanson, we come across this line: “They were, after all, part of a generation of winners, and as such possessed a certainty, hardly imaginable now, that given their education, connections and ambition; they had every reason to expect that with a little luck and a whole lot of push, they would have everything.” Discuss how the promise/myth of limitless potential affects all the characters over the course of the book. In what ways did their experiences mirror yours? Likewise, how has the recent downturn affected America's view of itself? Have you seen this theme appear in other works of literature?

3. The first line of the novel reads, “The modern marriage has two states, plateau and precipice....” Discuss the types of marriages and unions forged and tested in the novel, and how this sentence applies to them.

4. Lena and Charlie face many tests and suffer major losses, both as a couple and individually. The reader sees that they have very different ways of grieving. Discuss what impact you think this has on their marriage.

5. Edgarian introduces and describes two couples at different stages of togetherness—we see both of their first dates, and scenes of intimacy in one marriage between the exhausted parents of young children; the other between a couple of nearly fifty years. We also see the affairs that threaten both relationships. Examine the nature of desire as it plays out at these varying points in their lives.

6. Lena identifies with the woman caught shoplifting in the grocery store, because she too is “a thief stealing time.” Many of the characters act as thieves throughout the book. What are some of the things they steal and what do you think compels them to behave this way?

7. Edgarian skillfully takes readers into the diverse lives of servants and masters, citizens and illegal immigrants, rich and poor. Discuss how the novel looks at American society today, and what you think it says about our class structure. Do you think this is specific to San Francisco?

8. Much of this novel is about Lena’s quest for “a bit of grace.” What does this mean to you? How do you strive for grace in your own life?

9. Many readers remark on Edgarian’s ability to inhabit a wide range of characters. Theo is a particularly impressive example of this. Did seeing this world from a child’s perspective enhance your understanding of the Pepper family dynamic?

10. Lena’s mother Beverly often seems to take Charlie’s side over her daughter’s. Do you think Lena treats Charlie fairly? Do they have realistic expectations of each other?

11. What did you think of the revelation about Cal and Lena’s connection? Discuss Lena’s reaction. Do you think she suspected this? Did you?

12. There are several love triangles in the book: Ivy, Cal, and Beverly; Cal, Beverly, and Ted; Charlie, Lena, and Alessandro. Beverly admits to Lena that she did love both Cal and Ted—do you think Lena and Cal were also in love with two people?

13. With her million dollar engagement party and bad behavior over losing the funding for ArtShop, Paige would seem to be the ultimate spoiled brat. But in the end, she devotes herself to her parents’ care. Do you think Paige is a foil to Lena’s character? Why or why not?

14. At the memorial service for Cal and Ivy, some of the attendees speculate on the devotion of the recently deceased couple. Why do you think Cal and Ivy stuck it out for so long?

In the novel, minor characters such as the woman in the grocery store wearing in the fur coat, or Lila Hagopian, or the bum at Ivy’s door, appear seemingly out of nowhere, surprising and startling our main characters and forcing them to look at life and themselves in a new way. Discuss.

ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

1. Lena always seems to have news stories on her mind. Take a look through today’s paper and cut out the most unusual and interesting story you can find. Then share it with the rest of your book club.

2. Interested in what Charlie and Swanny were working on? Learn more about advances in robotic surgery at www.howstuffworks.com/robotic-surgery1.htm.

3. Carol Edgarian and her husband Tom Jenks are the founders of Narrative magazine, an online literary magazine featuring the work of both established and emerging writers. Visit www.narrativemagazine.com to read short stories, poems, and interviews.

A CONVERSATION WITH CAROL EDGARIAN

It’s been more than a decade since you published your first novel, Rise the Euphrates. What have you been up to since then?

Let’s see. Since finishing Rise the Euphrates, I got married, had kids, started Narrative magazine, taught innumerable classes, cooked dinners and wrote—often in the middle of the night when those other concerns weren’t demanding my attention. Juggling multiple full-time jobs has been my norm. It’s been a busy, busy time.

What inspired you to write Three Stages of Amazement?

Oh, so many things. For example, a woman I know who’s been married five times once said to me, “Listen, a hundred years ago it was a whole lot easier to promise ‘Till death do you part’ because back then everyone died in their forties.” Well, the line made me laugh but it also got me thinking. I actually put it in the book but later cut it. That line had done its work. It made think about how much longer people are living today yet our expectations regarding romantic love, fidelity, parenthood, friendship haven’t adapted. Or have they? I wanted to think about the marriages I saw around me. Young, old; certain, struggling. To go behind doors where, of course, no outsider is invited. It seemed to me that most love stories chart the early stages—what I’d call the blush—or they narrow in on a cataclysmic end. But what about the long middle, I wondered. When despite every fine desire to connect, partners miss; they screw up, give up, put up; they abandon themselves and each other. And yet they keep coming back. They keep coming back! What kind of craziness is that? It interests me. Related to that, of course, are the external pressures of life, specifically money, ambition, and the view we have of immigrants today versus when this country started—those subjects interest me greatly. Finally, I wanted to write about this moment in time, as America, post-Great Recession, has been stripped of its persona. America having lost its face. If we’re no longer the land of Manifest Destiny, of limitless resources, capital, potential, what are we? Where are we? 2009 was a pivotal moment in time worth capturing. Here we have Lena and Charlie, arriving at middle age, weathering their own hard knocks, at the same time that America hits the skids—that synchronicity, that frightening imbalance is where the novel begins. Lena’s question, Where is the grace?, seems particularly relevant to me.

Do you see much of yourself in Lena?

There’s a piece of me in all of the characters. To pull a line from the novel, my heart, like all our hearts, has many rooms. But is there more of me in Lena than the others? I don’t think so. My process is slow and it takes me a very long time until I feel I know a character, and by knowing I mean encompassing their real desires. My job is to be both sympathetic and utterly discriminating. And my job also is to thwart my characters’ desires so that something unexpected happens. Every character in the novel wants; they want what they want very badly and they want it now. Put two or more people in the same room with that kind of combustible heat and you have the making of drama. That’s when the fun begins. Writing Three Stages of Amazement was a whole lot of work, but it was also a whole lot of fun.

A lot of recent history makes its way into the book, and you have people like Al Gore and Norah Jones mingling amongst your fictional characters. What effect did incorporating these individuals have on the development of the story?

I can’t imagine working on a story for years that doesn’t strive to take a big bite out of the world. It simply wouldn’t interest me. The characters I write about are in the world and of the world. They are affected by what happens in the news and on the street. Isn’t everybody? I’ve never met a person, even a very small child, who doesn’t feel they own their particular piece of turf, and given that, have strongly held views on love, music, money, presidents, polar bears, and the weather. They are keepers of their time. I’m no different: I write about what impresses me, worries me, challenges me, inspires me—in short, what keeps me up at night. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the novel ought to have that kind of urgency, of important news just in from the front. It ought to reward the reader on many levels yet feel as earthy and essential as meat and potatoes. Excellent meat and potatoes, mind you. It ought to enliven the mind and nourish the soul.

Three Stages of Amazementis a portrait of present-day San Francisco. What is your connection to the Bay Area?

When I came west to attend Stanford in 1980, it was with a promise to my family that I’d be returning to New England in four years. Well, that was over thirty years ago. I love San Francisco. I even love it in the summer when I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about the fog. It’s a remarkable place: beautiful, diverse, quirky as all get out. I admire the city’s can-do scrappiness, it’s ridiculous optimism in the face of uncertainty. And I like that it’s a city where a writer can be left alone.

How did you come up with the idea of Nimbus? Is it based on real technology? How did you go about your research for the medical, business and technological elements of your story?

I always start out not knowing, with lots of questions. In the beginning, I let my curiosity lead. It gets me into all kinds of trouble. I research widely. I cook up what I think are outlandish schemes and then I find out someone in the world is actually doing that very thing. So, I follow that trail to see what it’s about. I was fortunate in this book to find doctors and people in various businesses—generous, wonderfully industrious people—who were willing to share their stories and let me follow them at work and gave me piles of information to read. One of my great joys as a writer is that I get to touch down into all kinds of worlds. Basically, I am overly curious. I fill up pages and pages of notes until I’m a walking factoid, until I’ve got the phrases, logic and rhythms that would make the scene I want to write plausible in that milieu. And then I forget everything I’ve learned. I sort of rinse out the mixing bowl and see what sticks to the rim. I use what’s on the rim as inspiration for the story.

Did you always know that Lena and Charlie would be able to work it out? Do you have a future in mind for their family beyond the pages of the book?

Have Lena and Charlie worked it out? I’m not so sure. Seems to me they’ve recommitted themselves to trying—trying, if you will, wiser. I suppose that’s the best any of us can do. “Happily ever after” exists only in fairy tales. That’s all right. Otherwise, life wouldn’t be nearly so interesting.

You have spent the last eight years building Narrative magazine. What have you learned about publishing?

Any writer and any publisher today will tell you that we are in a challenging period of change. My house in San Francisco is filled with bookshelves and many thousands of books, and what’s more important than the books themselves is what’s inside them. We’re seeing new forms of books and publishing and, more than anything, I’m optimistic about the human nature of storytelling and the creative imagination. It’s a belief shared among many. It’s why I write and why we publish Narrative.

Editorial Reviews

Edgarian (Rise the Euphrates) spares no emotion in this big, lovely second novel about decent people falling apart under the demands that there be more than 24 hours in a day and more than parental determination to juggle life's realities against the heart's desire.” —Library Journal (starred)

“"In what may well be the most serious and the most entertaining domestic novel of the year, San Francisco writer Carol Edgarian delivers a new turn on Tolstoy's old chestnut: "Happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." She calls her book Three Stages of Amazement and sets it in San Francisco toward the end of the "dot com" craze. We meet Lena Rusch, an appealing but harried mother of two whose surgeon husband has been trying, with middling success, to found his own medical device company. The novel deftly dramatizes questions about the essence of married life and throws in a mystery about Lena's origins for good measure. But there's no mystery as to how Edgarian keeps us going - deep insight into human behavior, coupled with the right language to describe it... Beautifully written and deeply engaging.”—Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered

“Both an epic love story and a reflection of social anthropology in America today, Three Stages of Amazement is a gracefully rendered narrative of the inevitable joys and heartaches we face in adulthood… Edgarian’s sharp, beautiful prose captures the essence of the human condition in all its pain and glory.”—The Daily Beast

“It’s been 17 years since Carol Edgarian’s best-selling, critically acclaimed first novel, Rise the Eurphrates announced the arrival of a gifted and ambitious young writer. Yet that long pause feels right when you read Three Stages of Amazement, her rueful, wholly adult novel...Edgarian brilliantly evokes the grim daily grind… Superbly crafted, skillfully plotted text… Three Stages of Amazement savors the rich complexity of human beings and the world they negotiate.”—Washington Post

“Lush and elegant… Edgarian is an exceptionally gifted and generous storyteller.”—Associated Press

“Edgarian returns with another potent tale…. The panoramic view Edgarian provides of a culture and people dealing with change is impressive.”—Booklist

“Edgarian’s novel examines the intricate economies of the modern American marriage... beautiful and as messy and complicated as real life.”—The New York Times Book Review

"Amazement" is a rare book -- one that can make you laugh, make you cry, and leave you thinking."—San Jose Mercury News

"Set in San Francisco, this rich book by Carol Edgarian evokes all the promise inveterate readers invest in the word "novel." Portraying the "post-blush" of love in a marriage weathered by financial crisis, grief, and the humblings of middle age, Edgarian animates real characters and identifiable lives with uncommon generosity.”—Barnes & Noble Review

From the Publisher

While aspects of the plot can seem contrived at first…the resolution is beautiful and as messy and complicated as real life…There is comedy here, and tragedy, and no small amount of poetry. Marriages, not unlike stock markets, have their peaks and valleys, too.The New York Times Book Review

Gabrielle Zevin

…turbulent, furiously compelling…Three Stages of Amazement is a fiery, deeply involving book with an eccentric streak that keeps it constantly surprising.The New York Times

Janet Maslin

Edgarian's accomplished second novel (following Rise the Euphrates) looks at the way the privileged cope--or fail to cope--when the fates turn hard against them. Charlie Pepper gives up his surgical practice and moves his wife, Lena, and family to San Francisco to found Nimbus Surgical Devices, just in time for the 2008 market crash. While he scrambles to replace funding, Lena has her hands full with the household, a premature infant with multiple health issues, a young son, and her own family. They are already teetering on the edge when Charlie is offered funding from the one source Lena will object to: her uncle Cal, the man behind her father's failed business and, possibly, his death. Edgarian is in fine form, giving readers a well-told story with characters of great depth and complexity, but it is her crystalline writing and the unique narrative tone that elevates this the most. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper rely on their deep love to hold back the multiple assaults on their marriage—Charlie commutes from San Francisco to Boston to perform surgery while trying to secure an infusion of venture capital to fund his revolutionary medical robotic device. Lena holds down the fort in California, tending to their delightfully mature, oddball five-year-old, Theo, and sickly Willa, who, at 11 months, is a surviving twin and in need of frequent hospitalizations. To add to the stress, it is early 2009, the new President is trying to put the brakes on the country's economic freefall, and the only source of big, big VC bucks is Lena's despised Uncle Cal, who, decades earlier, had an affair with Lena's mother, detonating the family. VERDICT Edgarian (Rise the Euphrates) spares no emotion in this big, lovely second novel about decent people falling apart under the demands that there be more than 24 hours in a day and more than parental determination to juggle life's realities against the heart's desire. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/10.]—Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Library Journal

High-octane melodrama from Edgarian (Rise the Euphrates, 1994) about a married couple whose brilliance, beauty and nobility are no safeguard against personal and societal woes during the first year of the Obama presidency.

Former PBS producer Lena Rusch has moved back to her hometown of San Francisco with her husband Charlie Pepper, a working-class Boston boy turned Harvard-trained surgeon/idealistic entrepreneur, and their precocious preschool son Theo. These almost saintly protagonists have been disgustingly happy together, but by the time the novel opens, shortly after the inauguration, life has already started to fall apart. Eleven months ago Lena gave birth to twin girls. One died immediately, and the survivor, Willa, has been in and out of the hospital ever since, her physical and developmental future still uncertain. Lena is exhausted, and she can't count on much help from Charlie, who is jetting around the country desperately promoting the robotic surgery technique he has developed that could change medicine. Unfortunately start-up money has dried up. Then Cal Rusch, Lena's extremely wealthy but estranged uncle, offers his backing. Lena is furious when she finds out, especially since Charlie doesn't tell her himself. Instead, the news comes from Allesandro, Lena's dashing former lover, who now works with Cal. Days after Cal and his socialite wife Ivy—think Nancy Reagan as a democrat—throw a million-dollar bash attended by Charlie and Lena, their lives fall apart too. Not only does Cal face mutiny in his company, both he and Ivy are struck down by fast-acting terminal cancers. Meanwhile, Charlie's financial crisis keeps him too busy to pay adequate attention to his family. Feeling abandoned, Lena turns to Allesandro. Theo runs away and breaks his arm. Cal reveals a deep secret concerning Lena. Willa gets sick a few more times. Finally she learns to crawl, and her parents pull themselves together.

Theatrical hokum, but written with an assurance and energy that will appeal to readers looking for comfort and romantic role models during this difficult era.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I'm a huge fan of Carol Edgarian's work, and this book stopped me cold with its wisdom. Set at the end of the Bush era as the country and the economy have hit rock bottom, Three Stages of Amazement offers us a love story for our time. At its heart, is the marriage of Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper, two fun-loving achievers who once believed that all it took to set the world on fire was a combination of smarts, determination, and love. But real life is far more complicated, and Edgarian's characters are far too real for easy answers. As they explore the far reaches of love, promises made and broken, and what really matters in life, these are characters you'll come to know so well, you'll miss them between readings -- if you can ever put the book down.
So, what happens when good people do all the right things, and life still tosses them around?
This is one you'll read more than once, and give to any friend who loves the feeling of going deep, and holding there.

notquitered

More than 1 year ago

I confess I have not read the entire book. I am struggling to get through it. I do not care enough about any of the characters. They all come across as whiny but not even in an interesting way. It is slow moving and I keep turning the page hoping something interesting will happen or some character flaw or character development will spark my interest but so far...no go.

Harold_Madison

More than 1 year ago

I bought this novel on the basis of several newspaper reviews, and I was surprised to find that the book exceeded the most positive of reviews, which is not often the case for me, as I am a fairly demanding reader, a former public librarian and now high school English teacher. Edgarian's novel is a lively entertainment that runs deep in the heart and offers thoughtful reflections on what matters most in life. It's rare to find a book that is both serious and funny, lyric and dramatic. I am buying copies for friends and recommend this novel to anyone loves to read.

alb04

More than 1 year ago

This story moves as on a greased track--suspenseful and fast. You cannot help feeling for the characters, the conflict is skillful and well-defined. It's a real page-turner. Edgarian's manipulation of language is fierce, glib, charged. I have only one problem with the book, and it's mine, not the author's. I come from a background (social and geographical) so different from from those in the book, I was often in a kind of intellectual Limbo--searching for the intent behind much of the dialogue. I could picture the setting because I have visited the area near San Francisco, but I had no frame of reference for the style of behaviors and the situations that were so important to how the central figures acted and reacted. Another admission: it might be in part a generation gap. This is dramatic and satisfying writing.

bachaney on LibraryThing

26 days ago

Three Stages of Amazement chronicles a year in the life of one couple--Lena Rush and Charlie Pepper, and their acquaintances and families. Lena and Charlie are a talented and smart couple--Lena a documentary journalist, Charlie a gifted surgeon. Charlie has decided to give up a job a Mass General to start a new business, where he will help to develop and sell a surgeon robot. The great rescession has taken away Charlie's funding, leaving him in a bind where he will need to turn to the one person Lena hates to try to save his business. Meanwhile, Lena is struggling to deal with the death of one of the couple's premature twin daughters while trying to keep the other daughter alive. These events will challenge the couple's marriage as others in their world struggle to keep their lives together. This was a challenging book for me to get through. At times, I thought the novel soared. I found the story was intense and the dialogue engaging. At other times it completely dragged. The author spent way too much time focusing on what I thought were minor characters and the opulence of their lives, including extensive name dropping in one elaborate party scene that seemed to last for a quarter of the novel. My other problem with this novel was that I really disliked all of the characters. They all seemed too wraped up in their own emotions, their own needs, their own lives, to take others in to account. Maybe this is the point of the novel, and where the central plot element hinges, but I still found it difficult to become really engaged in this story full of selfish people that continually whined about how much the economic downturn had hurt them. But none of the central characters were truly poor or without options, so I found it hard to empathize with them, just as it's hard to feel sorry for the millionare bankers and mortgage brokers after the economic bust. I do think this book had an interesting perspective on how stress pulls at the modern American marriage and life. But there were too many other things in this novel that made me dislike it overall.

kylenapoli on LibraryThing

26 days ago

Put in the most simplistic terms, Julia Glass in San Francisco. A good read.

njmom3 on LibraryThing

26 days ago

I liked the premise of the story - marriage, love, loss. It had the making of a good family story. Unfortunately, I did not care for the writing style at all. The book seemed to be trying to hard to be a literary novel. I felt that the story itself got lost in the writing attempt.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

I couldn't sustain enough interest in this book. I struggled to get past the first hundred pages, finally giving up and tossing the book in my donation pile. Characters were shallow and the plot line plodded along.

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

Anonymous

More than 1 year ago

I enjoyed this book very much--the characters were very real and I was able to identify with them in different ways. Loving someone so much and yet not knowing just how to show it, loving two people, in different ways and unable to fully let go. Trying to be everything to so many people can tear you apart. Definitely food for thought.